Stuffilike.net

“I found Google Images quite helpful. It is possibly the best resource for pictures of giraffes in space that humankind has ever created.”–Mark Eichenlaub, graduate student in physics, answering a question about friction in space on Quora.com.

Why not make it easier for people to take courses after college? In fact, why not decouple learning from degrees a little more?

<color_me_cynical>Money. The Industrial Education Complex is a vast machine that demands to be fed with brains wrapped in dollar bills. Its output is brains with the dollar bills removed.</color_me_cynical>

Andreas Hertz of Senckenberg Forschungsinstitut und Naturmuseum and Johann Wolfgang Goethe University found this little beauty in the mountains of western Panama. It’s called the Yellow Dyer because your fingers turn yellow from handling it (possibly leaching a substance through your skin which will cause you hallucinations, liver poisoning and Yog-Shogoth possession—or maybe not).

That’s right folks, Eli Lily has managed to produce a mildly-radioactive dye for PET imaging that will show amyloid plaques of the kind found in Alzheimer’s patients. This will allow doctors to test whether these amyloid plaques are a cause of or a result of Alzheimer’s disease, something that is still unclear. That knowledge may (if it is true) lead to treatments and prevention. If untrue, it may lead to better hypotheses. Either way, this is real progress.

A hilarious audiobook by David Wong, John Dies at the End is a trippy little Lovecraftian horror comedy and slightly funnier than Charles Stross’ Laundry series but with less interesting underpinnings, and in a less sober and serious way.

It completely cracked me up.

Listening to a guy calmly explaining the end of his sanity as the result of losing an argument with a dog pretty much did it for me, and that was just in the second chapter (well, .mp3, but you understand, right?). John and David are two slackers taken by the drug Soy Sauce (note who took whom), which gives them both inter-dimensional vision1 which sounds disconcerting and painful…and it is. It also leads them to soul-sucking lunacy as monsters from other dimensions make themselves known.

Bah, I don’t care about the horror part2 but I like the twisted view of horror that David has. P.G.Wodehouse might have approved of the descriptions of the horrors they face and their reactions thereto. I especially liked the reader’s matter-of-fact recounting of the events. Sorry I can’t tell you who the actor is. Amazon’s price is actually reasonable for this Audible audiobook , being less than the CD version by many bucks.

Exciting update: A sequel is upcoming.

1What the soy sauce really does is give them access to that other dimension, puts them in touch with astral projections, demons, mind controlling insects, and a sentient organic computer named Korrok that wishes to access our world. That, and the ability to count the change in your pocket, describe the dream you had last night–and all of it is mostly side effects.

2Hey, I’m a scientist, not a primitive or other sort of fundamentalist.

(1) The sun is in western Sagittarius in mid-December. (2) The sun is about 0.5 degrees in apparent diameter from near earth orbit, whereas the galactic bulge is about 15 degrees. (3) The sun is about -26th magnitude, so in a 94% annular eclipse like Sunday’s, it is about -23rd magnitude. Since the Milky way is showing limiting magnitudes around 8 or 9 in this photo, the camera has a dynamic range of more than 10^13. Nice photo, though.

As an actual geek (as opposed to a poser geek, which is what I usually am) I need to sync my Projects folder within Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 with my company desktop, company laptop and my home computer You would not believe how convoluted this is between the various (free) file services this is, involving setting up some special folder that I have to remember to dump the synced files to, to retrieve later and remember where on the next computer to put them. Yuck. I made batch files to do this for me, but there should be I better way….

And its Five Gigs of Storage for free (so far). That includes the dictionary files for my next two projects, and probably the third project as well. One of the creepy things they do, though, is ask to be given access to your Gmail, Yahoo! Hotmail or AOL(?) mail accounts to solicit your friends to become users also…this is optional, but they don’t offer you a way to do this on a person-by-person basis, which I would do.